Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

I landed hard, ribs snapping and a wash of red agony pouring through me. High tittering laughter from the hellbreed with the primrose-colored eyes, screams of approval from the clustered Traders. Five against one, and here I was on the floor.

This is not going well.

“Oh, Kismet.” The tittering hellbreed actually had the gall to play to his Trader gallery. “Did you fall down?”

Hot salt blood dribbled on my chin. The scar — the mark of a hellbreed’s lips — chuckled wetly on my wrist, a burst of razor-wire power jolting up the bones and cresting over my shoulder, my ribs popping out and hastily fusing back together. My left hand closed around a gun butt, and I found out that the primrose-eyed bastard had thrown me over near my whip.

Well. Better late than never. My right hand shot out, grabbed the bullwhip’s handle, and the sonofabitch was still laughing when I rolled up off the floor and the leather flashed out, a high hard crack that was the jingling silver flechettes at the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier. The hip leads in whip-work, a slight advantage women have. When added to speed and cussedness and the etheric force humming through the scar and jacking me up into superhuman, it was all I was going to get.

It was going to have to be enough.

Naked light bulbs swung at the end of cords, crazy-dappling shadows over the warehouse’s interior. The whip lashed, and flayed the primrose-eyed hellbreed’s face. It cut him off mid-chuckle, and if I wanted him dead now would have been the time to shoot him.

But I didn’t. Instead, I shot the Trader springing at me in midair, and to my right, the one who had somehow cottoned on that I wasn’t down and out yet. He’d swapped some of his humanity for superstrength and superspeed, but my aim was true and half his hell-trading head evaporated. That took the pep out of him, bigtime.

Lucky shot. I was just lucky all over tonight.

The screaming started, and from there it was straightforward. My next shot took out one of the hellbreed ringmaster’s bending-backward little knees. He had folded down and was screaming, the black ichor that passes for their blood bubbling out past the thin fingers clasping his face. Said face was now a mess of hamburger and there were three more Traders to deal with.

I hadn’t thought they’d be stupid enough to stay at their last known hangout. Not when they knew I was after them. I hadn’t precisely made a mistake — I’d just thought about questioning them before I started killing.

Mikhail would have told me not to bother. But he wasn’t here. Twenty-nine days since the Weres lit his pyre and his soul rode the smoke to Valhalla.

I was on my own.

Four minutes later the last Trader died gibbering at the end of a long smear of black-tinted blood, the corruption eating up his tissues and making the body do a St. Vitus’s dance. The pacts Traders make claim more than the soul, and maybe they would think twice about mortgaging themselves if they could see what happens when one of them bites it.

I don’t know. All I see are the ones who chance it.

I turned back to the hellbreed. He wasn’t so pretty now, and I hoped I’d gotten one of his eyes, popped it like a bubble. The whip coiled neatly and stowed itself, habitual movements while I kept the blubbering hellbreed covered. I ached all over and my ribs twitched, bone resetting itself. The scar pulse-burned on my right wrist, sawing against the nerves of my arm.

Slow and easy here, Jill.

My smart eye was hot and dry, watching the plucking under the fabric of the surface of the world. He could really be that hurt, burbling and moaning into his hands. But the tension in his shoulders — clad in once-elegant navy Brooks Brothers, now spattered with blood and other fluids — told me otherwise. His suit coat flopped around a little, low on his right side where the first bullet had taken a chunk out of him. Black ichor dripped and the noises he was making were straight out of a nightmare.

“Cut it out.” My voice sliced through his. The silver charms tied in my hair rattled and buzzed, blessed metal reacting against the contamination in the air. “You’re not that hurt.”

“Bitch,” he blubbered into his hands. “Oh you bitch.”

You’d think they’d find something more original to call a female hunter. I kept the gun on him, every muscle quivering-alert. The scar burned, working into my flesh. “You can guess what I’m after.” Each word very carefully weighted. “Slade. A hunter. Taller than me. Black hair, silver charms. Disappeared about twelve hours ago.”

“Bitch,” he moaned again.

I didn’t have time. So I blew away his other knee. The report boomed and caromed through the warehouse’s interior, and he crawfished on the floor, whisper-screaming because he’d run out of air.

“You have arms, too,” I reminded him. “Shoulders. Ribs. Genitalia. Start talking.”